Mark Warburton made a stunning admission today at his sit-down with the press. Speaking after McCoist’s statements last night, where the former Rangers and Sevco boss said he believes the club to be “two or three years behind Celtic”, Warburton told the assembled hacks that he knows he and David Weir will be “gone before that” if it comes to pass.
In the last few months, the reality of life at Sevco has slowly been dawning on this guy. Now he gets it, in full. Should things not go according to the Dave King plan it won’t be the convicted tax cheat from South Africa who pays the price; it’ll be Warburton himself.
This website has been saying much the same for months, and earlier this week I wrote that this guy should consider whether or not managing this club is worth the utter ruination of his career. I think it becomes more obvious, with each day that passes, that it’s not.
Warburton will have done the math by now.
It would take a very stupid person not to have concluded that the gap between the two clubs is unlikely to be closed in the next few years, if at all, barring some remarkable turn of events which is hard to conceive of.
Either King will find money in the mattress (and a Scottish mattress at that, so the money doesn’t have to be subjected to his plea bargain and South African exchange controls) or some oligarch somewhere will decide he wants an expensive plaything, and, with no prospect of ever seeing a dime again, he opts to pour a fortune into Sevco.
I think you’ll agree that neither seems particularly likely.
The gap is unbridgeable under the present circumstances. Celtic has the greater reach and the more diverse business plan. Our ten thousand extra seats is but one of a number of inbuilt structural advantages we hold over them. They can’t even keep their sponsors and shirt-makers on side. They are basket case club run by egotists without the first clue how to restructure things in a way that might make some small difference.
It’s impossible to feel sympathy for this guy.
He was blinded by the idea of managing what people told him was a big club that had fallen on hard times. He believed the worst kind of nonsense, the biggest pile of steaming bull ever told in football, and this has cost him precious years of his career but the facts were out there for anyone who wanted to look. He went to work for a notorious, congenital liar without proper guarantees and now his chairman is hanging him out to dry, and preparing to make him the scapegoat for failure.
And failure is coming. I strongly suspect he’ll not get to the end of the season before he discovers just how stacked against him the deck actually was. If he believes his current team of has-beens and no-hopers is going to secure second spot in the SPL he better think again.
They look nowhere near good enough, and all the big talk in the world won’t change that.
For the first time Warburton has said in public what must have been going through his mind in private.
This isn’t going to end well for him.